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Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

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Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#131

Post by take_a_breath »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #96
take_a_breath wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==When my office door is closed, everyone knows I'm "at work". If you don't have a separate physical space where you only work, I can see how this might be a challenge.== Now add a partner who also works from home. Will the extra space (and hardware) needed to comfortably fit all these new home workers be another cost shifted from companies to employees? If my company wants me to work from home much longer; they need…

My company provides a very generous allowance (~$1000) for work from home equipment (desk, etc). Yours should too, and if they don't, vote with your feet.

Good call, I should just go get a new job in the middle of the worst destruction of jobs in history. After I do that, my one-time $1,000 stipend won't make my house bigger.

The point is that if more people are going to work from their houses, then houses will need to be bigger in the medium- to long-term.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#132

Post by iso1631 »

cortesoft wrote: post #102
toomuchtodo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mid 30s, partner, two kids, will only work from home. Will not consider a commute or an office. Have worked remotely for almost a decade. Doing the math, I've saved almost 3360 hours by not having to commute (~2 hr/workday), not to mention wear and tear on a vehicle and the associated commute costs. When my office door is closed, everyone knows I'm "at work". If you don't have a separate physical space where you only…

Who is taking care of the kids when the 'door is closed'? I guess it depends on how old your kids are... I have a 4 year old and a 1 year old, so someone has to be watching them all the time. Also, my house only has 3 bedrooms, and the kids take two of them. My office is in the corner of the living room with no walls. I can't lock anyone out of it. Your house has to be large enough to support a home office to work fr…

> Who is taking care of the kids when the 'door is closed'?

Same person taking care of them when you're at work. Except for 3 hours a day less

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#133

Post by Ericson2314 »

epistasis wrote: post #91
shuckles wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The land values are legit. That they cannot be amortized across many occupants is not.

I get where you are coming from, but my intuition is that we have actually created a massive bubble in land prices by restricting use so much. Land would get a hell of a lot cheaper if we massively decreased demand by letting people live in ways that use less land.

Well there are countervailing trends here: on one hand, land being extra scarce because it is used inefficiently, and on the other, land being extra valuable because it is used efficiently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox is probably the answer: Non-idiotic land use would make the cost of floor area decrease, but the cost of land increase.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#134

Post by geddy »

viklove wrote: post #84
geddy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always reading about job openings throughout my country (or world, for that matter) that offer 100% remote positions, and initially the huge difference in salary was pretty jarring. Then I hopped on Trulia for some less populated (not rural, but certainly not close-to-the-city-suburbs), and realized the mortgage for a house twice my size would cost the property taxes I pay now. Literally talking about a $25,000/y…

fuck hn

Totally, it's a dangerous path to tread. Suddenly your potential worth as having you as an employee is tied to how small of a shanty you live in.

"Whoa, this guy's resume says he has 20 years experience and lives in a box down by the river, wonder if we he'll take a $7,000 salary?"

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#135

Post by foobarian »

valar_m wrote: post #11

Christy Lake, chief people officer at Twilio: > “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says. So, in case anyone is applying to Twilio, heads up, I guess.

The market will take care of itself. It works like TCP but negated. Companies will drop the offers until the hiring success rate tanks, and then slowly creep it up until they get the headcount they need.

The question is, what kind of offers are the remote candidates living in Dirtcheapville, MI going to accept?

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#136

Post by troydavis »

daenz wrote: post #79
subsubzero wrote: post #18

One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida an…

What's the rationale for this?

Currently, the market for location-based labor is deeper than the market for location-agnostic labor, so employers assume that their competition is local - and often it is.

That's less true for the top 20% or so of tech candidates. A person with known skills and a good network can obtain offers from multiple remote-friendly companies today. There's already a location-ignorant market for their skills (probably not at San Francisco comp, but also not at rural North Dakota comp).

As more remote jobs are available, more people will receive multiple remote offers, that is, they'll find a deeper location-ignorant market for their skills. Over time, one would expect this location-ignorant comp to settle around the actual value added.

(Longer explanation in a related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18900072#18903795)

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#137

Post by bhupy »

ransom1538 wrote: post #48
zaidf wrote: post #14

People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state

Salary based on your locale even though everyone is remote: hilarious. "Oh you live in Alabama you get 60k" "Oh you live in Manhattan on 65th street that is 150k". This will backfire into a political hell.

We already do salary based on your locale...

If you are a software engineer and you show up to work in an office in Alabama, you already make less than the same software engineer showing up to work in an office in Manhattan.

The only difference here is that you don't show up to work in an office, you show up to work in your pajamas and the office is at home.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#138

Post by dontbenebby »

aripickar wrote: post #8

I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home duri…

>There is just too much detrimental effect one one's career from not being seen at the office. For a company that's not fully remote (i.e. gitlab), people who are fully remote are going to fall behind in promotions, etc.

I thought the model in SV/SF is often you need to change jobs to get substantial pay bumps/title increases.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#139

Post by subsubzero »

daenz wrote: post #79
subsubzero wrote: post #18

One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida an…

What's the rationale for this?

Sorry to be cynical but I assume its just profit driven, keep in mind not all companies employee these bands. For those that do their rationale is why pay a employee more than the region dictates? I think an employee needs to figure out if the COL drop still makes sense to where they move. Say you make 200k in the bay area and move to san diego, which I was told is about a 10% to 15% paycut, you still make 170k and a typical engineer there makes alot less than this, so basically its all down to how bad you want to move to an area and if it makes financial/career sense.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#140

Post by toomuchtodo »

take_a_breath wrote: post #131
toomuchtodo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company provides a very generous allowance (~$1000) for work from home equipment (desk, etc). Yours should too, and if they don't, vote with your feet.

Good call, I should just go get a new job in the middle of the worst destruction of jobs in history. After I do that, my one-time $1,000 stipend won't make my house bigger. The point is that if more people are going to work from their houses, then houses will need to be bigger in the medium- to long-term.

Should you live near your job if it's expensive? Your choice. Should your employer pay you more if they can pay someone less who lives somewhere cheaper? Their choice. If you want to live in a small place in the city, there is a cost. If it's not pleasant to work from there because there isn't enough space, that is part of the cost. You are competing with folks who can now work from home, and have the space to do so effectively. Is that good or bad? No, it just is.

Life is about choices. I'm enumerating my choices because I want to help others make choices that help them have a higher quality of life when the choice presents itself. Do what is best for you. I apologize if any of my responses come across as anything less than helpful; my intent is to be helpful.

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